Preparing students and families to thrive in the gene age

Limit to the gene chip, Stephen Fodor.

If you think about putting the entire genome on a chip, the entire genome is roughly three billion base pairs, or the non-repetitive part of the genome is maybe two billion base pairs. So you might say, well once I put two billion bases on there, or two billion different strands of DNA to detect all of those bases, isn't that sort of the limit. Well it is, if what you're trying to do is simply detect those particular sequences. Of course there's another phenomenon in biology which is called polymorphism, and that is that individuals carry changes to their DNA. So if you want to start building variations of sequence on the chip, there's almost an endless number of questions that one might ask in terms of the different variants of DNA that you may want to detect.